Hurricane season is upon us and officials at the Horry County Emergency Operations Center say their focus is getting the community prepared.
“We really start the outreach efforts where you’ll see us going around to HOA’s, Facebook groups, and folks who ask us to come and speak about what they can do to prepare themselves and their communities for a hurricane,” Thomas Bell, spokesman for the Horry County EOC said.
This is the first hurricane season that Horry County will operate on three emergency operation condition levels rather than five.
Bell says the goal of the change is to make it simpler for people to understand the severity of events.
Operation condition level three means it’s a normal day with no threat of a natural disaster. Operation condition level two means you should expect some impact from a natural disaster. The most sever of the levels is number one, which means you should expect immediate impact from a natural disaster.
“When we change those op con levels, that’s really when our day-to-day changes to the point where we are going to open the EOC, generally on op con two,” Bell said. “That’s when we’re going to get all the representatives from the different agencies both in the county and in the state.”
